03-06-10 Mars Test Mission to Pushes Limits of Human Stamina

The current record for longest single space flight is 437 days and 17 hours,held by Russian Cosmonaut and physician Valeri Vladimirovich Polyakov.He was aboard the Mir space station from 1994 to 1995.His first words back on Earth are reported to have been:"We can fly to Mars."That would take 520 days,or 17 months,according to the overseers of an experiment starting today.An international crew of six male "test pilot" astronauts will live inside a windowless facility at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow beginning today in "Mars500" to simulate the length of time that a round-trip to Mars would take.The cost of the mission is reportedly $15 million,funded by the European Space Agency and Russia's Roscosmos,according to Der Spiegel Online.Although the participating astronauts are confident they can endure the extreme "Real World"-style scenario (they will be observed on video feeds by researchers),a previous experiment in the same vein conducted last year at the same facility ran for just 105 days and saw a surprising source of conflict:New rules were introduced by American and Russian authorities to prevent the grounded astronauts from sharing food and restroom facilities."Afterwards I learned to appreciate the small things -- the blue sky or birds singing," one of the previous study's participants said, reports Spiegel.Or as Jason Kring of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University told AOL News in March,"The main obstacle of a human mission to Mars is not the technology [or] the human body. ... The main obstacle is the human mind."